This episode of Rise of Rev Ops features an interview with Matt Buren, VP of Sales and CX Operations at Bombora, the leading provider of intent data for B2B sales and marketing. Matt Buren is an experienced SaaS revenue operations & sales development leader. Before his promotion to Vice President of Sales and CX Operations in May, he was the Sr Director of GTM Operations. Prior to Bombora, he worked in sales and revenue growth at SheerID. On this episode, Matt talks about why you should do everything you can to avoid department silos, the importance of being prescriptive rather than reactive, and his secret sauce for success in RevOps.
This episode of Rise of Rev Ops features an interview with Matt Buren, VP of Sales and CX Operations at Bombora, the leading provider of intent data for B2B sales and marketing. Matt Buren is an experienced SaaS revenue operations & sales development leader. Before his promotion to Vice President of Sales and CX Operations in May, he was the Sr Director of GTM Operations. Prior to Bombora, he worked in sales and revenue growth at SheerID.
On this episode, Matt talks about why you should do everything you can to avoid department silos, the importance of being prescriptive rather than reactive, and his secret sauce for success in RevOps.
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Guest Quote
It's not about reporting line. It's not about title. It's how do sales and marketing need to interact? And how can we improve those processes? The data management and hygiene processes and tools, like outreach. Maybe that's not somewhere where marketing lives, but we can be taking some of our marketing strategy and building it into those tools to help that alignment between sales and marketing. - Matt Buren
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Time Stamps
*(01:20) Meet Matt Buren
*(01:50) What is Bombora?
*(03:18) How Bombora’s RevOps team is different
*(04:38) Sean’s first 90 days in the role
*(06:00) Segment 1: RevObstacles
*(6:21) How Matt aligns his team
*(11:10) Matt’s advice on avoiding miscommunication
*(12:58) Segment 2: The Tool Shed
*(14:42) Matt’s favorite Metrics
*(26:24) Matt’s Spreadsheet Tips
*(27:47) Tools Matt can’t live without
*(30:58) Segment 3: Quick Hits
*(33:03) The Biggest RevOp Misconception
*(33:57) Some Final Advice from Matt
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Sponsor:
Rise of RevOps is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified’s Pipeline Cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the Pipeline Cloud on Qualified.com.
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Links
Hello and welcome to Rise of Revops.
This episode features an interview with Matt Buren, VP of Sales and CX Operations at Bombora, the leading provider of intent data for B2B sales and marketing. Matt Buren is an experienced SaaS revenue operations & sales development leader. Before his promotion to Vice President of Sales and CX Operations in May, he was the Sr Director of GTM Operations. Prior to Bombora, he worked in sales and revenue growth at SheerID.
On this episode, Matt talks about why you should do everything you can to avoid department silos, the importance of being prescriptive rather than reactive, and his secret sauce for success in RevOps.
But first, a brief word from our sponsor
Rise of RevOps is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified’s Pipeline Cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the Pipeline Cloud on Qualified.com.
And now, please enjoy this interview with Matt Buren VP of Sales and CX Operations
At Bombora, and your host, Ian Faison.
Welcome to rise. Rev ops, I mean Faiza and CEO of Caspian studios. And today I am joined by a special guest, Matt.
matt: I'm doing a goodie and how you doing?
Ian: Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat rev ops, uh, or perhaps, uh, some other terms that, uh, that we will talk about later in the show. Um, and, uh, and all the cool stuff that you are doing it at Bombora.
Um, so let's get into it. Uh, what does Bombora do and who do you sell to.
matt: Yeah. So we are in the intent data space. Um, we essentially are helping sales and marketing teams align on what companies may be in the market for their solutions or their competitors. So we help you sell to who wants to buy you?
Ian: And, uh, you?
have a new role. Uh, so tell me a little bit about, uh, about what.
matt: Yeah. So I am the VP of sales and CX operations for Bombora. Um, my team supports all three of our business units. Um, our agency business, our publisher and co-op business, as well as our direct sales unit. And everything reporting and dashboarding tools and systems. Um, if it touches Salesforce, you're, we're going to be involved.
Um, if it's part of the tech stack, we're going to be involved. And then, um, one big thing that we're pushing now is, um, you know, scalability and repeatability, sales process, renewal process, things of that.
Ian: And, uh, and how, how big is the team? How big is the.
matt: Yeah, so we're just under 250 employees. Um, and our ops team, uh, we've got, uh, five, so that's myself, I'm a dedicated CX operations person. I'm actually a former CSM. That's been invaluable in helping us design some of those processes. Um, we have a full-time analyst and then a full-time systems add. Uh, that supports all of our systems that touch Salesforce, and then we have an admin.
Um, that's kind of a, I jokingly call her the puppet master occasionally, because if it's coming into Salesforce or it's data being ingested, it's going to come through her.
Ian: And do you feel like a rev ops is unique in your organization? How does it compare to other rev ops teams? Do you think.
matt: Yeah. You know, I think, uh, you see a couple different schools of thought, right? Where you can just slap a rev ops title on everyone in all. And hope that that leader knows sales and marketing. Um, you know, when I came into Bombora, we had rev ops titles, but they were very focused, right. Where I think some of our rev ops folks were marketing specific, some were sales specific.
And then you got a couple, I think there were kind of in between. So, you know, what we've learned from our uniqueness is we don't necessarily need to be, it's not about reporting line. It's not about title it's how do sales and marketing need to interact? And how can we improve those processes? The data management and hygiene, um, processes and tools like outreach, where maybe that's not somewhere where marketing lives, but we can be taking some of our marketing strategy and building it into those tools to help that alignment between sales and marketing.
So I think for us, it was unique and we had the titles, but we didn't quite do rev ops where today. You know, myself and my counterpart shout out to Dave Kennedy. Um, who's our VP of marketing ops where he and I worked side by side and making sure that when we're addressing problems that are going to be cross-functional, that we're doing that together and not in silos.
Ian: And so tell me what it was like coming into this role for you. What, what were those first 90 days?
matt: Yeah, uh, fire drill for sure. Um, you know, I think, uh, I was lucky enough, you know, I started here as an SDR leader. Um, I've got an operational background. Um, you know, I started at a company when we were about 30 Lars. Uh, you know, we scaled to about 220 by the time I left. Um, you know, so I've learned how to build tech stacks.
I've learned the inner workings of how that communicates with, you know, marketing platforms like Marketo and HubSpot. So I had a unique view of where I had been through it before. Um, and we had an opening with our sales ops leader leaving for another opportunity. So it became more about how can I be beneficial to the company outside of just my current role.
So a lot of it was really just digging. What aren't we doing today that we have to be doing? It's looking at the table, stakes, forecasting, um, you know, opportunity management. Do we have the right sales stages? And that was kind of where we started was really ground up of taking a step back and say, just because we have been doing it a certain way doesn't mean we should be that might've been the right, the right option at the right time.
But I think that we needed to iterate on quite a bit of stuff. So a lot of it was. That 30,000 foot view of taking a step back. What do we have today that we're good with? What are we missing? And then what do we have today where we think we can improve upon it and then prioritizing from there?
Ian: And we're going to get into all that here in our next couple of segments. So let's get to our first segment rev obstacles, where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops. Uh, what's the hardest rev ops from that that you faced, uh, maybe in those first 90 days or, or in the past six months.
matt: It's just like, for me so far in my career, it's been alignment right. Where it eventually comes through, but you have an executive team that maybe hasn't been used to, you know, a very high level of operations, right. Or maybe the process hasn't mattered as long as you got to the number where I think it's trying to get, you know, trying to build a business case for executives to show the value.
Of what a true focused operational unit can do for, especially for a growing business, like Bombora is where, you know, it's hard to get budget for your rev ops, whether it be at your tech stack, be it headcount. Um, you know, you have to invest in that stuff to help your business become more predictable. So you can balance those budgets better, right?
Where if, you know, if we have this process and now in a given quarter, you know, taking, we have X seasonality, we have Y head count to hit the number. That you can put all of that together and be able to make sure that you're meeting those budgets where you're not having to readjust quarter by quarter, right.
And really flying by the seat of your pants. You can do all that planning in October, November, December, and feel confident in that operating plan, in that, you know, the, your plan to generate leads, how much pipeline each of your reps needs to hit their number and really what the company needs to do to hit a given operating plan.
You can be a lot more prescriptive in that rather than being reactive to the things that are popping up, you know, every day where you get these small requests where you're like, oh yeah, we can fix that when you're looking at fixing it. It's all of a sudden like, well, we don't have these three processes to even like, hold like have data hygiene on this field you're asking us to create.
So we've got to create a process around it. We have to train and enable on it. And I think that the more. Focus, you put into operations, the better you're able to address that rather than making it up as you go.
Ian: And how do you, how do you balance supporting sales, marketing, and CX or customer success?
matt: Uh, the calm app's really good for meditation. Uh, um, you know, a lot of it is just like over communicate, right? I think it's, uh, You know, there's a lot of zoom burnout, you know, there's a lot of unnecessary. I'm sure everyone working from home knows there's a lot of unnecessary meetings that were a lot more necessary when you're in an office.
So I think a lot of. How can you better collaborate? How do you turn some of those meetings into working sessions where, you know, I've seen, um, you know, my team does a phenomenal job of this where it's okay, let's talk through the business problem. You're trying to solve. Don't give us the solution you want us to build?
Let's talk through how we can do that. And I think it's just it's communication. I know. It's way more simple. It sounds more simple than it is, but over communicating, making sure that you're staying on top of not just creating the process and rolling it out. Is it measuring what you thought it would? Is it B, is that process being enforced?
I think if you don't have that, cross-functional buy-in it can create silos where ops is just creating projects. For a sales leader, that's asking for it, but that sales leader is not enforcing that process. So it's work for the sake of work, where if you have a really tight unit between sales, marketing, ops, even finance, for that matter, if you can work as a unit, the amount of stuff you can get done and plan for becomes a heck of a lot more broad than just saying, Hey, here's the number we need to hit.
Here's your budget. Go figure it out.
Ian: What's your biggest revenue groups that you've made mistake in the past.
matt: uh, I tend to course correct way too far on one side or the other. Um, I can think of, you know, we've moved towards a, a shared goal where it's not necessarily, is it inbound? Is it outbound? Do we have enough pipeline and deals for our team to hit the mark? And my biggest, oops was I didn't think through some of the downstream effects of how's that going to affect tracking, how do we still measure SDR efficacy?
How do we manage, like what the AEs are doing from an outbound perspective? Is that impacting the pipeline? And I think it's just these new grand ideas that you hear them all the time in rev ops. Right? I feel like it's every six months, there's a new, big idea. The companies are following this and it's helping alignment.
And I think it's hearing that big idea and wanting to pounce on it, but not necessarily talking about your org and thinking through all the downstream effects that changing that type of view can really have on, on a company. Luckily, we were able to pivot on it, but there was a good three months there. I don't think you could really trust that source reporting.
And it's because that just wasn't in our minds because we were trying to move away from that where it's not, you know, your sales and marketing team doing this. It's more about how are we going to arrive at the goal, but the efficacy piece kind of suffers when you don't think of all those downstream effects.
Ian: yeah, it was. What would be your advice to, to someone who is listening had a rev ops, uh, how to sort of. sort of thing.
matt: I found it's that taking a step back, right. It's okay. If we do this, what is going to touch this process? So if it's, if it's source and you know, that's an, an, an opportunity and you're measuring when you're, you know, you're grouping the data by okay. Wearable where all of our opportunities being sourced, then, you know?
Okay. So the executives are going to want to see this from a team by team breakdown. You're going to want to see SDR payback here. And so I think it's just. Talking out loud, white boarding for me has always been a huge help and just document out, you know, out loud or on that whiteboard, what are all of the things downstream of this change that could even potentially be affected?
And then you start to process of elimination of, okay, well, if we handle it, you know, on, on this singular piece that it makes a couple of these other downstream pieces go away because we're handling it at the top, but I think you got. In my experience, people don't take into account how granular of a problem, even one small change can make, especially with how much automation exists between tools and systems these days.
So I think it's really back to the over-communication. Yeah. Out loud, brainstorm everything you possibly think that change is going to touch with all of their cross-functional owners and then try to arrive. I mean, are you always going to get it? No, if we got it right every time there'd probably be a lot less of us.
Right. Because then the business could just run itself. But I think it's, it's striving for that perfection of just always making sure that you leave no stone unturned and then making sure that you're bringing in anyone that you think from a business leader standard. Is going to be a recipient or that's going to be negatively affected by that change.
Ian: All right, let's get to our next segment. The tool shed we're talking tools, spreadsheets metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool qualified. No B2B tool shed is complete without qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and check them out, Matt. What is in your tool shed? What's the software you're using.
What are the dashboards where you spend the most of your time?
matt: yeah, so qualified, uh, new customer, but I will give them credit where credit is due. I have never had a tool launch without a huge hiccup. Like we have, we launched last week. It's been live it's phenomenal. It's everything that I thought it would be. Massive shout out. I'm not getting paid for that comment, by the way.
Um,
Ian: but we love it. We love to hear it.
matt: um, so the big ones for us, you know, obviously Salesforce for our CRM, we use HubSpot for our marketing, uh, for marketing outbound. Um, we've got some really cool process between, um, Salesforce and HubSpot where we're actually ingesting Bombora data and building scores. So we've got three different main scores that we use an account score and intense score and an engagement score.
That's a combination of HubSpot data, Salesforce data, and Bombora zone data. Um, so obviously Bombora is part of our stack because if it wasn't, that'd be crazy talk, uh, sales navigator gong, um, you know, we use outreach as, as our, um, SEP, uh, And then, you know, we've got for the CX team, we use a tool called plan hat.
That's really great. That helps with, um, lifecycle adoption, health scores and things of that nature. That's our, I'd say our core stack and then cognizant, um, from a prospecting standpoint.
Ian: Awesome. Well, let's, let's talk, uh, um, let's talk metrics. What matters to you?
matt: Kind of everything, but top, top level, do we have enough pipeline and hit the operating plan? And do we know where that pipeline is coming from? Uh, those are the big ones, right? I think it's, um, you know, building the executive dashboards that have, what is the top, top level metrics we care about and how can we plan accordingly for that?
How do we know in a given quarter where we think we're going to land from a forecasting standpoint? Um, I think the next level down from that is what does it matter for the teams? Do we have enough deals in the pipeline right now that each rep has enough to hit their number? Right? Cause when we built our lead model, we said, all right, we know what our win rates are.
We know what our conversion rates are. We know what our average deal sizes. So let's build our pipeline goals around that. So what most of my attention is on is typically. In quarter and skip quarter forecasting. And then from a pipeline generation standpoint, do we have enough in the pipe, regardless of where it's coming from, that RAs are set up to be able to hit that forecast.
Ian: What about, an exampleof something that happened in your pipeline that you notice wasn't working, maybe you saw a metrics or maybe it's coming from leadership. How'd you go about fixing it?
matt: Yeah. So, um, early in my career, when I first started really running forecasting and understanding, you know, taking that the vast case, most likely worst case, um, we notice a lot of stuff was getting stuck in one state. But we didn't have a lot of understanding of why it was getting stuck on this stage.
Like, is it how we qualify? Is it what we're telling reps to do in this stage? Cause it was a guided sales motion where each stage had a path to success, essentially. Um, and so what we found was. That was just where reps were parking deals because the next stage was proposal. So they hadn't quite shared pricing, but they weren't quite ready to close the deal out and be done with it and move on to the next one.
Um, and so what the problem that created was we had a lot of dead pipeline that probably should have been white. You know, quarters in advance that we're just pushing out quarter over quarter. So it helped us AE understand we need better qualification metrics in stage zero and one, where a are we are the reps actually moving?
What's a legitimate. Evaluation of our product into the pipeline. And what it ended up doing was the cascading effect. We realized we were probably under qualifying accounts. We were over qualifying opportunities that most of which probably should've never made it to the pipeline in the first place. And it was making us look like we had a horrendous.
And that second stage, but realistically, we're just doing a bad job, qualifying those opportunities. And so it helped us rebuild those paths to success of here's some questions we suggest you asking in the qualification phase in the discovery phase, and it helped us really draw some hard lines where SDRs to feel comfortable handing something off.
Here's the type of information we need. And then using something like medic med, pic band, um, to tie your sales stages to, to better, to better influence that data. And then what we learned after that was we're losing in proposal because we're priced too high in the market, but we would have never caught that previously, had we not stopped and said, why are all of our deals failing out on stage or stalling out or failing out in.
Ian: Yeah.
that's super fascinating. I, uh, and a really interesting insight because you had basically. The Oreo sandwich of, of either side of it. We're both pressing into the same stage when neither of them probably, uh, should have been in that stage to begin with. And so you're kind of like, you know, not triple reporting, but you're, um, essentially just, you know, have it, have it kind of complete, completely wrong there.
I'm curious. Like, what did you, what were, what were the questions that, I dunno if you remember some of the questions that you wanted them to.
matt: So it was, um, like we had one that was talking about, so the, the software was like verification software for, um, like students, teachers, it dated support, like those programs like Spotify student discount program, for example. So it was more. We are asking what we wanted to know right. Where like, what's your budget?
What's, you know, how do you view, you know, a tool like this, instead of asking the questions of like, what's your marketing spend look like this year, how do you have your promotions laid out on your account, on your promo calendar and things where that would give us a far better signal? That it's an active evaluation that we're moving appropriately through.
Um, where I think some of those questions we weren't asking. So we were asking during the pricing phase where we started to realize we needed to ask them that upfront because we just weren't doing it. And so what was happening was we are getting people through. They had an understanding of what we did, that it admitted that they thought that our tool could solve their problem, but that was about us.
It wasn't about them. We weren't asking customer focused questions that would help us understand. Are they really going to buy something like us because we're an investment, right. I think we were 10 X higher than our next competitor. Um, and so we needed to be able to build that business case and where I saw us fall down a lot was early and luckily we're able to catch it, but, you know, I think that it'd be easy to just say, well, we lose most of our deals in stage.
Ian: Yeah.
matt: be done with it, move on to the next thing. Right. And I think that was the first time in my career where I realized there's always more to the story than what the data is telling you. And it's about figuring out the narrative behind it and using that narrative to help you inform change.
Ian: Yeah. And I think that a great, uh, great rev ops leader, may or may not have a great VP of sales, right. That is like being able to dig in and figure that stuff out and to say like, oh, Hey, and it's easy for the rep to just say, Hey, it's. Right. Or, you know, um,
matt: unresponsive is my favorite one.
Ian: no, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's exactly right.
And it's like, uh, and then you, you know, you have the, the abandoned, abandoned deal and you're like, man, we abandoned where you can no response abandoned all this stuff. And yeah, maybe like you said, maybe it is pricing, um, as the root cause of that, but it's also, you know, It's being set up poorly, uh, from the jump street, because they're like, yeah, I would love to have a Maserati, but you know, like they're going to test drive the Maserati and they're going to, you know, check it all out.
But at the end of the day, like they never even identified that they, you know, had Mazraani money. Uh, even though they have a, I dunno, need for speed.
matt: Yeah, I think there's plenty of tools out there that have really big price tags on them, but they add value to your company. It's just all about where your company is. Right. And if you can't help your sales team understand why they're losing deals, then it, then you just keep going back to. here's all of our, here's all of our close loss, reason codes.
I don't know why this isn't telling us what we're doing. And I think it's trying to be more prescriptive and there's a fine balance of being reactive to the fire drills and then being proactive with us with the sales leader, whether they're operationally, savvy or not, it's helping them understand what you could be doing better.
And then like letting them help you make the decision of, okay, here's our suggestions of what we could do. But are they, are they going to enforce all that with their team? Because the work that a lot of ops teams put into building process ends up leaving a bad taste in their mouth. And why? I think sometimes you see like an AAE go at odds with it, with a sales ops, um, you know, team of you're not helping each other.
Right. Opposite saying, put in this date. But that's all you're getting. It's not, Hey, if you put in this data and we can keep it clean, here are the insights that we can give you to help you close more deals. Right. And I think it's just that small piece of it. Miscommunication maybe, or like poor expectation setting.
Hey, we need you to put this data in, but there's no rationale behind it. We just need you to do it versus, Hey, if we do this, here's the end result that we can provide to you. And I found in my career so far, that's been a big, that's been a big differentiating factor
Ian: Yeah, and it, and it identifies. And I think that the rep never understands the like, Hey, if, if you put this in there and then we learn a bunch of stuff, About this stage. And then we learned that, okay. It turns out because of the fact that we've been able to categorize this for six months as this, we need to actually build a whole nother piece of content around this topic, or we need to, you know, create a. You know, whatever it is, uh, additional, uh, sales assets or, you know, create another deck or, oh, it turns out we're losing to this one competitor, a bunch like you don't realize we're losing to this competitor a bunch because you don't see the whole field. And they never mentioned this competitor, but from all the activity on the website that we're seeing, uh, you know, we put a link up there that said, you know, us versus.
And everybody in this stage of conversation seems like they're clicking on this. Like there's so many different third and fourth order effects that the rep doesn't necessarily see there. And that's, that's where you can, you can, it creates work on the, on the backend that can go back and solve the problem for, for all of the.
matt: Yeah. And I think it's just helping them understand what's in it for me. Right? Like we're, we're only human. Like I can't just be, oh, we're mandating this and you need to do it. I think it's being able to work with everybody and say, here's why we need to do it. And if you still arrive with a sales leader, Hey, that's not important.
Then, you know, sometimes as an ops leader, you're just going to have to defer to that person. Um, you know, I think I have a bad habit of like, but here's where we could be. Right. Where I think sometimes it's trying to balance the, where you could be, but where you need to be today. And I think that's where I think a lot of communication breakdowns end up happening is you focus on where you could be, or you need to be, but you're not focused on shoring up where you are to.
And where you can take those incremental steps to really help everyone buy in to changing a process or requiring specific fields get filled out before you can move to the next stage and things of that nature.
Ian: It also gives you a little bit more ammo when a bunch of people are asking for something. And to say, Hey, I know that this is something that you keep coming in contact with. You're the only rep that keeps on coming in contact with there's nobody else complains to this that's, you know, uh, et cetera. And so like, we can figure out a way to help you in particular with this one problem.
But like this one might kind of be a you thing, like a one-on-one coaching thing, not necessarily like a system.
matt: Yeah, I think, you know, we, like one thing that I've seen in my career is using gong for something like that. Right. Where gongs got a lot of really great like rep coaching tools where it's trying to enable your sales leadership team to wear. You're going to have to take time out of your day to do it, but here's where you can find this stuff.
And here's the type of things that we can do with that data. And then, you know, being able to roll that up to a product marketing team for product requests or product feedback, being able to see like is a rep monologuing too often, and maybe that's where it's falling down. Like there's just so many insights that you can gather from how complex these tech stacks are today, where.
Uh, sales leader is not going to do the homework themselves. Like they don't have time. They've got a big number over their head. They got to go hit. Right. And I think that's where ops can come in. You're already paying for the tool, work with your CSM, work with your account manager on how you could better leverage that tool and then provide those trainings for the reps, for the, for, you know, for even the execs to some extent of help everyone buy in and understand what you're getting out of that part of your stack, to be able to change behavior and drive and drive those improvements at really any step of the process.
Not even necessarily just opportunities.
Ian: All right. Let's talk spreadsheets. You have.
matt: You know, I've got to say it's usually my, my joking favorite is every time I forget to include, uh, object ID from Salesforce and I need to do create a fancy V lookup for it. Uh, but I think the best one that I've seen is in lieu of like a Clary or like an insight story. Forecasting spreadsheets because Salesforce is not a great as I'm sure everyone knows is not great at moment in time snapshots.
So it's taking your forecast every time you present it. Um, you know, for us, we're trying to build a forecasting schedule around that and being able to timestamp in that spreadsheet. Okay. When we pulled it this week of the quarter, Here's where we stood and then being able to use those snapshots in time to see how a we've progressed and then B measure forecasting accuracy, because I mean, how many, I mean, I've only been at two companies in SAS.
That was huge, right. Where, Hey, we want to be like, we even had it for a member card to the leadership, got bonused on being within a certain amount of that forecasting accuracy. Right. And you can't do that in a lot of systems, unless you're pretty advanced in using something like Clary. So that's probably my favorite spreadsheet because it saves me time and helps me understand data trends without having to worry about manipulating data within a system that that system can't necessarily handle.
Ian: Do you have something, uh, whether it's a tool or, or otherwise they can't live.
matt: I think it's gone. I mean, it's, it's starting to, you know, to tread into the forecasting area, right? I mean, Salesforce is the easy answer, but with gong, they're starting to come up with. Data points where, Hey, when you have this many contacts and an opportunity, you close them X amount more, right? That's not a data point.
That's going to roll off the top of my head or an analyst had, right. Because we're in that fire drill, we're in the reactive mode of all of the requests you're trying to do were gone. Just gives that to you and it's insights piece. We're so busy, worried about all this tech that's out there that give the kid do this thing.
This one thing really well where we're not focusing on all the things were gong outwardly is call recording. Right. But there's forecasting elements. There's Hey, this is slated to close this quarter and you don't have a call booked for the next three weeks. Like explain to me why you still think it's going to get done.
Um, where I don't think we could do forecasting without it, um, in the way that we do it today. And then rep coaching. I mean, Building trackers. The fact that you can add those any time looking for product feedback. A lot of what we're trying to evolve into is going to revolve around having that stuff in gong and making it actionable material coming out of what we learned in those conversations.
Ian: Do you have a. Uh, any other, any other tip from whether it's spreadsheets or anything that you're doing data or any piece of advice, uh, around, uh, around those, those pieces?
matt: I think from a data standpoint, account scoring is one I've seen. That's like a, it's a, always a moving target where I don't think I've seen people get. Enough time to a model that they build. So I think the big tip I would give is work really closely with whoever's managing your marketing platform, be it Marketo or HubSpot, you know, act on it doesn't matter what it is, but there's gotta be an element of scoring model that's coming from all of your different systems.
And a marketing leader, that's in charge of that tool. Isn't going to have all of that information at the tip of their fingers. Neither is, or either as a sales ops or a rev ops leader. Right. And you have to have all of the people involved that that data is going to influence to make sure you're building the scoring correctly.
You know, I mean, there's people out there saying MQs are dead. Like, I wouldn't say they're dead. I would just say it's time to look at them in a completely different manner. Like one thing that we're working on. Is account-based SLS. So it's not one person, but Hey, this account has shown interest. Have we started outreach to them, right?
Where, you know, that's an easy mechanism to tell your sales team, Hey, here's everyone that's showing a high level of. Here's who we should prioritize. And, you know, we wouldn't have that here without a really strong marketing ops team that was able to build that scoring in association with the sales team.
And we look at it, you know, we've got a meeting on Friday where it's been a while since we looked at that and our target account definition and just continuing to iterate on that kind of stuff, I think would probably be the biggest tip for me. Never be scared. You're never going to get it perfect. The first time, like always be ready to.
Ian: Let's get to.
our final segment, quick hits, quick questions and quick answers. Number one, if you could make any animal really big or really small, what would you say?
matt: Ooh, I think tidy hippos would be. Like tiny domesticated hippos
Ian: how tiny are we talking? Are we talking like hamster?
matt: Like corgi sized hippos.
Ian: Okay. Are they, do they still have the hippos mean temperament? Are we, are they, are they docile?
matt: I mean, corgis are pretty mean too, so let's give them the same. Yeah. Let's look there. A corgi temperament,
Ian: I like that. Well, I always look,
matt: and a hippos Bonnie.
Ian: I was like that, that, uh, hippos can like eat a watermelon. I feel like it's very satisfying watching that, but maybe this, you could throw them like an orange or something
matt: Yeah. I mean, Sam, you probably even see what they could do to a watermelon at that size. Who knows?
Ian: that's true. Um, do you have a top three dinner party? Yes.
matt: Ooh,
George Carlin.
And Dane cook and where I'm coming from on Dane cook is I just want to know what happened.
Ian: He made a lot of money. I think
matt: I very fond childhood memories of Dane cook, and then it just disappeared. I'm like for some reason, that's my like unsolved mystery in the back of my head is what happened today.
Ian: Yeah, it's a great question. I think he, I think he probably made a ton of money and, uh, and probably the inspiration to be really funny. Uh, probably subsides a little bit. When you, when
matt: But could you imagine the conversation between FDR and George Carlin? Like just the absolute goal that that would be
Ian: extending there, like I was in a movie with Jessica Alba. Um, all right.
matt: rom coms. Am I right?
Ian: Right. Uh, do you have a biggest rev ops misconception?
matt: then we just take requests. I think it's very easy to step into an org and say, my team needs to do this here. Rev ops. Here's the bullet by bullet list of what you need to do. Go implement this. I think that's probably the biggest, one of all of that should be a conversation, even as small as out of. You want to understand, like I mentioned earlier, what are we trying to accomplish here?
Right. Cause if I had a nickel for every time, I've seen us create a field in my career where six months later, no one was using it or enforcing the data being in that field. I would probably not even need to work again. Like it's crazy. So I think it's anyone that's not in rev ops needs to understand conversation like rev ops should be a partner.
They're not someone that's just knocking out your to-do list.
okay. Last question. Um, best advice for someone who just came into a role as head of rev ops, what, what's your piece of advice?
matt: I mean, just talk with everybody. Don't make changes until you learn more about the business take stock of your system and your tech stack. It's really, it's like what I mentioned at the top of the, uh, you know, at the top of the conversation, take a step back, ask what's working. What's not working interview everyone.
You can. Coming through that information is going to be a lot, but I think you gotta hear it from the reps. You gotta hear it from the league, from the leadership team, you got to hear it from the executives. You know, you got to understand how is each person's day affective, positively, or negatively by what your rev ops teams should be doing.
And that can help you figure out at the end of the day, our job in rev. Make everyone look like the hero surface, the great work that everybody is doing and help the executives understand. Yes, we are on pace to hit our number. No, we're not. Because then that leaves, you know, the one-to-one meetings where they're meeting with sales leaders, where you're getting bugged every day of where we are in the forecast, what's our most likely, where do we think we're going to land?
If you can work with sales leaders to be able to roll that data. It saves a lot of people a lot of time and you help make the people look like heroes and get the credit where the credit's due rather than worrying about how you're going to figure out who should.
Ian: It's been fantastic chatting with you. Thank you for all the insights. I really appreciate it for our listeners. You can go to bombora.com to learn more. Any final thoughts, anything.
matt: Uh, no, it's just them glad you guys are doing this. So I think we need more podcasts out here about rev ops it's. It's good to see rev ops finally getting its due. Uh, I hope everyone starts to, you know, jump on the bandwagon and realized it's really the backbone of any of these successful orgs out there.
Ian: I love it. Thanks for having me.